Neill Harvie-Smith

Channel 4 did the nation a great service by recently showing Martin Durkin's Trillion Pound Horror Show in primetime, and the documentary attracted 1.3 million viewers. The scale of our national debt - nearing £1 trillion on the official measure or almost £5 trillion if you include unfunded pension commitments - should be at the heart of Conservative thinking on the economy.

When you read about "savage cuts" in the media and hear threats of public sector strike action, consider this: the Government is planning to borrow money to meet its spending commitments in every single year of this parliament. This massive battle to reduce the deficit to zero, this huge struggle, is about eventually stopping the problem from getting worse. By 2015, assuming the government keeps to its spending plans, we will have added another £300 billion to our national debt. That's how hard this is to fix.

George Osborne is right to bear down on the deficit in the short-term. His target is "a balanced structural current budget by the end of this Parliament." Now he should establish a long-term Sustainable Debt Target for the UK economy. The government should set a course for meeting the old sustainable investment 'rule' - introduced by Gordon Brown - that debt should be no more than 40% of GDP.